Vitruvius

(c. 80 BC - 15 BC)

While the life of the Roman architect Vitruvius remains obscure, his ten-book treatise On Architecture served as a touchstone for city planners and artists working through the Renaissance and the baroque period. Leonardo da Vinci derived his “Vitruvian Man” from a passage in Book III in which the author attributes the design of classical architecture to the proportions of the human figure.